Marketing Yourself at Work

Merits and demerits#

It’s both easier and harder to market yourself at work. It’s easier because it’s a smaller pond, and your coworkers have no choice but to listen to you. It’s harder because while you have people’s attention, abuse will not be tolerated.

If you are obnoxious online, people can mute you and carry on with their lives. If you are obnoxious at work, it can backfire pretty directly on you. In particular, always share credit where it’s due and never take credit for something that wasn’t yours. Of course, this applies in public too, but enough people do it at work that I feel the need to remind you.

Ideas for marketing at work#

Basics aside, you would probably agree that it’s important to ensure you get visibility for the work that you have done. Here are some ideas.

Log your own metrics for significant projects#

Record before-after latencies, increased signups, reduced cloud spend, uptime improvement, increased session time. I’m sure your company has an expensive, comprehensive, and well-instrumented metrics logging system (this is a joke - one does not exist). Don’t trust it. It will fail you when you need it most or be unable to tell the story you want told. Hand collect metrics, links, press coverage. Take screenshots. Collect qualitative anecdotes, quotes, shoutouts.

The best time to do this is right after you see a good result because you won’t have time to go back for it. Stick it in a special place somewhere for a special occasion - like, say, a performance review. If you use Slack, it can be helpful to make your own Slack channel and Slack yourself your own notable achievements. This gives you a nice chronological log of work.

Awesome status updates#

Status Updates are a humdrum routine at most workplaces. Most people put no effort into them. You can buck the trend by making them awesome with just a little more effort. I’ve seen this “flip the bits” in team morale – after seeing just one person do this, people realize they can either continue being boring or join in the effort to do the best work of their lives.

Unprompted status updates#

Sometimes a project is so disorganized that there aren’t even regularly scheduled updates. Management probably vaguely knows what is going on but is too busy to ask for more. You can fill the leadership vacuum simply by doing your own regular status updates.

Do demos#

Offer to do them every time. This is an internal marketing opportunity that people regularly turn down because of the stress of public speaking or because it’s more work. You don’t even have to wait for an assigned time for demos — since many workplaces are now at least partially remote and asynchronous, you can simply put up a short recording of your own demo! Good demos will spread virally, and so will you. Caveat: make sure you have the stakeholder approvals you need before you do this; don’t demo work that isn’t ready for prime time.

Signature initiative#

I stole this idea from Amazon, but I’m sure other workplaces have terms for this. Basically, this is something that you do on the side at work that sidesteps the usual org chart and showcases your abilities and ideas. After pitching the idea unsuccessfully for two years, Zack Argyle convinced Pinterest’s CEO to turn Pinterest into a PWA based on a Hackathon project. This had a tremendous business impact and probably made his subsequent career. This is a very high bar. Don’t worry, your contributions don’t have to be that directly product related.

Simpler initiatives I’ve seen might be to find opportunities to share your interests with fellow devs. Start an internal book club. A lunch and learn series. If leaders at Google and Etsy started an external talk series, why can’t you? Matthew Gerstman started a JavaScript Guild at Dropbox and created a newsletter, forum, and event for hundreds of his fellow engineers to improve their craft. This is wonderful! I did something similar at Two Sigma, and when I left, my coworkers said they would genuinely miss my sharing and discussions.

For more ideas on becoming indispensable at work, check out Seth Godin’s Linchpin. You can find a decent summary here.